French Costume Drama of the 1950s

Fashioning Politics in Film

Susan Hayward

• Editorial: Intellect Books
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781841504346
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Film History & Criticism

When political and civil unrest threatened France's social order in the 1950s, French cinema provided audiences a unique form of escapism from such troubled times: a nostalgic look back to the France of the nineteenth century, with costume dramas set in the age of Napoleon and the Belle Époque. Film critics, however, have routinely dismissed this period of French cinema, overlooking a very important period of political cultural history. French Costume Drama of the 1950s redresses this balance, exploring a diverse range of films including Guitry's Napoléon (1955), Vernay's Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1943), and Becker's Casque d'Or (1952) to expose the political cultural paradox between nostalgia for a lost past and the drive for modernization.

Part I

Contexts

Chapter 1

Introduction

Costume drama – a suitable document for study

I would like to begin by quoting from an interview with Rosine Delamare, the top designer for costume drama of the 1950s (with some 23 French costume drama titles to her name in that decade alone). She said:

A period costume does not need to be a faithful reproduction. It is not put on screen as a document for study.¹

Whilst she is certainly correct in the first sentence – costume can only refer to the original: it cannot be it – how wrong she turned out to be in her second! Within Anglo-Saxon film studies, as we well know, costume design now constitutes a considerable domain of research.² It has become, therefore, a suitable/fashionable document for study. Costume design is integral to the genre – after all, the word ‘costume’ is embedded in the very typology (‘costume drama’).

To pause briefly on the definition of costume drama: I am taking it here in its broadest sense as a film set in an historical period that features characters dressed in costumes pertaining to that era. The corpus of films to be investigated in this study will be any French produced film set in the pre-1914 era, the moment when the Belle Epoque came to an end with the declaration of the First World War (the Great War as it was then known). Whilst none of these films are historical films, a handful run close in that they are biopics or fictionalized accounts of real people. But for the most part, the films we are to consider are adaptations (73) and original scenarios (36) grounded in different periods of France’s past. As such, as we shall see they inevitably have national resonances. For a full listing of the 109 films in this corpus, see Appendix One.

There are three compelling reasons for the study of 1950s’ French costume drama, and, with it, the costume document. The first reason is an historical and statistical one; the second, socio-political; the third, industrial. In statistical terms, the so-called Golden Age of the French costume drama film ran from the Second World War/Occupation period through the 1950s.³ Here is a breakdown of the figures:

Figure 1.1: Percentages of costume dramas to total film industry production released during the 1940s and 1950s.

Thereafter, from the 1960s onwards, the genre rather rapidly declined and for two major reasons: the shift to location over studio shooting (an effect of the French New Wave) and the actual expensiveness of the product.

The above figures require further comment, however. Whilst costume drama has never been a dominant genre, with an average of 12.2 per cent over its twenty-year Golden Age period, it still remains a significant second order genre – very close in fact to the thriller genre (which averaged 13 per cent of the output in the 1950s). It is also worth remarking that whilst, during the Occupation period (1940–1944), the dominant genre was the melodrama (50 per cent of all production), post-war, through the 1950s, the dominant genre was comedy (some years reaching 50 per cent of production). It is something of a revelation, then, that although 1950s’ audiences mostly wanted to laugh (as opposed to feeling caught up in narratives of melodramatic pain), they also liked to be taken back to a past – just as much as they enjoyed indulging in France’s own version of the film noir tradition. One final point on this statistical evidence: although, in percentage terms, the costume drama during the Occupation period was greater, in terms of actual volume, its numbers increased nearly fourfold in the 1950s. Alternatively, we could say that, over the twenty-year Golden Age period, the 1940s produced 43 per cent, and the 1950s 57 per cent of all costume dramas. Whichever way you consider the statistics, the genre has a significant enough presence to merit investigation.

If the Golden Age was 1940–59, you might well ask why this study should be restricted to the 1950s. A part answer is that film historians and critics have already extensively researched the 1940s – but this is not the primary consideration. More significant as an answer is the socio-political conjuncture. The 1950s was the period of radical modernization in France, whereas the war/Occupation period most patently was not. Indeed, the need for escapism through costume dramas in that context is self-evident. As for the post-war period (1945–1949), this was one of reconstruction. It was not until the 1950s that the economic boom started to take off. So it is particularly interesting to view the costume drama genre within a climate of modernization and economic growth – a trend this retro-seeming genre appears to buck. In other words, the question becomes, rather, why did this Golden Age continue so vigorously during the 1950s? We also need to recall that the 1950s was the moment when France (particularly Paris) sought to re-establish a sense of national identity post-war. And one of the major ways that it did so was via fashion (as an export item and as a marker of cultural superiority). What better vehicle for fashion than the costume drama – even if, especially if, it spoke of a time gone by, thereby confirming the lengthy heritage of France’s fashion supremacy, and thus its legitimacy as a nation of taste.

A final reason, industrial this time, explains this focus on the 1950s. This decade was the time of big changes in terms of management and personnel structures within the film studios. In 1948, the decision was taken by studio bosses to no longer keep a permanent team of studio personnel on its books, but to hire as needs be. There were two major reasons for this. The first was linked to the power of the unions. At this time, unions were strong, backed as they were by the Communist Party and their workers’ union the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT, of which much of the film personnel were members). The studio bosses were clear that they did not want to share management with CGT group representatives, nor did they want to risk strike action – so a unilateral decision was taken to rid themselves of permanent staff. The second reason had to do with pension fund contributions. The bosses were unwilling to settle on paying the same level of contribution for personnel as for themselves (by law all contributions had to be the same). These decisions brought about all sorts of knock-on effects. In dismissing the permanent staff, there was no one left to maintain the upkeep of the studios’ stock of pre-constructed décors which, in turn, led to its dispersal. In a crucial sense, this dispersal of stock meant the loss of an invaluable resource but also of an intertextual specificity to set design. To explain: because, formerly, sets were reconfigured from one film to another, it could be argued that they represented a sort of intertextualized collective memory (that is, these sets had been seen before even though in a different assemblage and context). Gone, therefore, with this dispersal, was a certain notion of memory – to say nothing of the loss of sets designed by the grand masters of the 1930s, such as Lazare Meerson.

More concretely, there were other areas of precariousness in the industry. Gone were the days when personnel were kept on a payroll – now replaced by another type of practice (hiring at will). Gone, too, was the regular maintenance of the studios. The outcomes were twofold. On the one hand, studios were now much more at risk of being sold on for profit to other concerns. This started to happen in 1956 when, given their prime locations, some were sold off for property development (e.g., Courbevoie), others to the newly expanding industry of television (e.g., Buttes-Chaumont). On the other hand, studios were more streamlined and cost effective. Now, the studios were run by a small management team. Producers hired the studios, selected the top personnel to work on any given film and hired them as needs dictated. The top personnel then, in turn, selected the technicians (and so on) with whom they wanted to work. This represented a massive change in both personnel management and production practices and led, of course, to fierce competition amongst film crew. However, this shift also meant that production values soared in terms of quality. And it is here, arguably, that the term of ‘cinema of quality’ – so dismissively coined by François Truffaut for 1950s’ French cinema⁴ – has its greatest validity in a non-derogatory sense. A point to which I shall be returning repeatedly in the course of this book.

Costume drama – a genre in context

The political culture of France during the 1950s, generally speaking, is still an under-researched area, although there is some scholarship of note.⁵ In terms of film history, there is very little, let alone any sustained, exploration of specific genres, and this includes the costume drama, which had an important output in production terms (see figure 1.1 above). In audience terms, it was also a very popular genre. Moreover, as we shall come to understand in our journey through this corpus of films, gender identity and sexual relations are often to the fore of these narratives whether it be questions of masculinity, the role of women, or issues of marriage. It is worth bearing in mind that, whilst the costume drama is most readily seen as a women’s genre, we know that, in 1950s’ France, cinema-going was very much a family affair, weekend audiences making up to 70 per cent of the receipts.⁶ Thus it is safe to assume that mainly family audiences consumed this particular product and – since it could be argued that men and women consumed these images in equal parts – this has interesting implications in relation to questions of gender representation in general and that of masculinity in particular. Audiences went to see their favourite stars, suggesting that it was the actors performing in the films first that attracted spectators to a particular film. According to Montebello, the stars with the strongest appeal were either big names or great actors and included amongst others, Jean Gabin, Gérard Philipe, Pierre Fresnay, Sacha Guitry, Pierre Brasseur, Daniel Gélin, Fernandel, Bourvil, Jean Marais, Yves Montand, Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan, Martine Carol, Brigitte Bardot, Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau.⁷ Montebello also informs us that all spectators were attracted by the likes of Jean Gabin, Fernandel, Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan;⁸ the more educated classes’ preference was for Pierre Fresnay, Gérard Philipe, Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan; the ‘popular classes’ preferring Gabin, Gina Lollobrigida and Fernandel.⁹ Surely, in this last category, we must add in Martine Carol!

In historical terms, we can see how the costume drama speaks, albeit in a paradoxical even contradictory way, to the socio-economic and political climate of the 1950s. First, France was in denial of its immediate past (German Occupation), yet the themes of treachery and denunciation occur repeatedly in these costume dramas. Second, the socioeconomic conditions of the working classes and the gender roles of men and women were in considerable flux at the time, despite attempts to disguise these truths. Third, the representation in these films of France as a nation of culture, with a strong drive as a civilizing force in its colonies, was clearly at odds with its contemporaneous reality as it entered into its first phases of decolonization in the form of wars with Algeria and Indochina. We shall, nonetheless, encounter some interesting exceptions in our corpus whereby a small number of films address these problematic issues, however obliquely. Finally, as with film production after the 1914–18 war, there was a move to exploit the educative potential of these films with the adaptation of the great authors. This strategy was a way by which France used its cinema as a propaganda tool both to educate its citizens in relation to their cultural heritage and to affirm a strong sense of national identity in the aftermath of a devastating war. But, intriguingly, whilst we see this pattern in evidence in the immediate post-war period (1944–1949), by the 1950s these ‘great authors’ (such as Hugo and Zola) and other less great but still important authors (such as Dum...